That Dress Is Trash!

Here's your nightly math! Just 5 quick minutes of number fun for kids and parents at home. Read a cool fun fact, followed by math riddles at different levels so everyone can jump in. Your kids will love you for it.

That Dress Is Trash!

It’s good to recycle your trash instead of throwing it out. But it’s even better if you can just wear it. Every spring, lots of big kids go to special dances called proms, and need to wear special clothes. So a few kids have decided to wear trash. Maura Pozek made her dress from Dorito bags. Another girl, Regan Kerr, made her dress using 5,000 pop tabs from soda cans. It took her 5 months to make it, but hopefully she didn’t drink all that soda herself!

Little kids: If you use 20 blue Dorito bags and 30 orange Dorito bags, of which color do you have more? Bonus: How many more? You can count up to find out!

Big kids: If Regan started her 5-month dress project in the middle of November, would she have finished by mid-May? Bonus: If Regan and 9 friends drank those 5,000 cans of soda, and split them equally, how many cans did each person drink?

The sky’s the limit: If Regan started drinking 50 cans of soda per week 1 year earlier, would she have built up 5,000 pop tabs in time for prom?

About the Author

Laura Bilodeau Overdeck is founder and president of Bedtime Math Foundation. Her goal is to make math as playful for kids as it was for her when she was a child. Her mom had Laura baking before she could walk, and her dad had her using power tools at a very unsafe age, measuring lengths, widths and angles in the process. Armed with this early love of numbers, Laura went on to get a BA in astrophysics from Princeton University, and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business; she continues to star-gaze today. Laura’s other interests include her three lively children, chocolate, extreme vehicles, and Lego Mindstorms.